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AOL Cuts Back on Blogs to Save Cash

AOL is apparently telling some of news blogs under its wing to cut back on posts in order to trim down its budgets. The sites that are impacted by the move fall under AOL's Weblogs division and include DownloadSquad, Diylife.com, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog. All have been asked to stop posting content until July 31, according to paidConent.org.

The moratorium on content is bad news for the impacted blog sites and their writers who earn their pay based on posts they publish, and also for readers that look to the blogs for news and other content. Diylife.com appears to have been handed the short end of the stick since it will be shut down completely.

In a memo to its sites, Weblog stated "The goal is to safeguard against further budget overages, thus protecting our business and hopefully continuing as usual (though maybe a little restrained) in August. Going forward we will remain slightly leaner, but my hope is that by the end of the year we'll continue to ramp up as we have historically."

TUAW will be allowed to publish one or two App Store articles a day, and DownloadSquad posters are expected to cease publishing all articles through July 31.

The post cutbacks in the end may have more of a negative impact than positive since readers could start looking elsewhere news, and the people behind those posts may have to look for alternative places to make money.

While AOL's bloggers are taking a hit now, other parts of the company will get their turn soon, too. The Internet company is also discontinuing some of its other projects including Bluestring, Xdrive, AOL Pictures, AIMWorld, and MyMobile. AOL Video Portal has begun a transition to become part of AOL Programming Video Experiences and should be completed some time in the company's fourth quarter.

The cuts are intended to help make the company more attractive to potential buyers, but ultimately may make AOL less attractive to its customers and employees.